


Of Light and Space

by hellkitty



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One)
Genre: M/M, Plug and Play
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-28
Updated: 2013-01-28
Packaged: 2017-11-27 08:40:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,221
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/659996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellkitty/pseuds/hellkitty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mid-canon.  a little something for tf-rare-pairing prompt 'I've seen all your demons' non-sexual pnp</p>
            </blockquote>





	Of Light and Space

Drift flinched away from the sting of the patch gel on his injured wrist cable and even further at Wing’s soft apology.  “Didn’t hurt,” he said, blunt and automatic. 

“It made you uncomfortable,” Wing said.  Reasonably. All too reasonably. Especially from the mech who had caused his injury in the first place. Another day, another ‘opportunity’, as Wing always chirruped.

“Whole place makes me uncomfortable,” Drift muttered. Everything here was like Wing, beautiful paradoxes and Drift was a mech who was used to things being ugly and simple.

“I’m sorry for that, as well,” Wing said.  He sat back on his heels. “May I finish?”

“Fine.”  Drift thrust his injured arm out with ill-grace. “Probably fun for you to fix what you broke.”

“It was a hard fall,” Wing said. “But I don’t think you’d have appreciated if I held back.”

If it would let Drift win so he could leave?  He might consider it, even as the very idea rankled his pride. He was Deadlock, feared even among his own troops. He’d seen the bounties the Autobots put on his head for kill or capture.  If you were valuable dead, you were valuable, more valuable than a lost spark from the gutters no one would notice was gone. “Thanks for your consideration,” he said, acidly. 

Wing gave his bright smile, as though taking it as a compliment, before bending back over Drift’s injured wrist. “I wish,” he said, dipping in with a small swab to wipe up some leaked energon,  “You would give us a chance.”

“Wish you’d let me leave.” He was aware how petty he sounded, how spiteful and small. He didn’t care. 

“Drift.  I can’t. It’s too dangerous.”

“I’m not afraid of a little danger.” He could handle himself.  He’d be smarter next time.

“This isn’t ‘a little’. There’s a price out there on every Cybertronian. You’d be captured and handed over to the Galactic Council for interrogation. Or worse.”

“They could try.”

The gold optics caught his, tempered to sadness. “They would succeed, Drift. One mech, by himself, can’t fight the entire world.”

He bridled. “Says you.”  But it was a small resistance, rote rebellion.  Because that was his whole life, his history. “It’s always been me against the world.” Always. Even in the gutters.

Wing sat back, turning to cap the sealant gel tube. “That sounds rather lonely.”

It was. “None of your business.”

Wing snapped the medikit shut with two, crisp, efficient little clicks of the latches. “Drift. We’re a city here. A community. I care about your happiness. Is that so hard to believe?”

 Yes. “You don’t fraggin’ know me.”

The gold optics sought his, and for a moment, he evaded, before forcing his new blue gaze to meet Wing’s.  “I want to, Drift.  A-and there’s a way, if you want it, too.”

“What?” Drift heard his own voice asking, drawn by whatever little flicker-flame of vulnerability in Wing’s voice.

Wing turned his own forearm over, releasing a small catch. A slender, flex-mesh cable spooled out into his hand. “We could…?”

“I don’t have one of those.” He’d never seen it before.  Probably some fancy thing rich mechs had.

“You do,” Wing said, reaching for Drift’s arm, and finding the little hidden catch.  “Your old armor hid it, that’s all.”

And now Drift felt vulnerable, Wing knowing things about him he didn’t know himself, staring at the cable that tendrilled out onto his palm with something between shock and wonder. 

Wing held out his.  “Can I?” 

Drift gave a shrug, non-committal, not sure exactly what he was agreeing to, but lifting his hand to Wing’s.  Wing took Drift’s cable, holding it gently, and rolling the connectors closed with one gentle little stroke of an index finger.

Drift could feel it, immediately, like a new mod, but bigger, moving against his own programming: Wing. And he was in Wing, as well, a stranger in a beautiful place. He felt something cascading before him, the space seeming to open up, airy and bright and as he moved, he felt like what flight must feel like—free and graceful and buoyant. 

He couldn’t describe it: it was beyond sight or sound or any of his sensory inputs, but it was a sense of spaciousness, warm and welcoming, unconstricting. Even the shadows were pale pastels, like diaphanous veils. And he could see, like flashes of murals or holovids, images of Wing’s history, from his own optics—flying or fighting or arguing, fearful in mad flight from a burning Cybertron, determined and hopeful, laying out the base grid of the city. 

He realized that Wing was doing the same: being in him, a presence in a space, but he knew his own space was small and dark and ugly.  His awareness skittered back along the cable, to himself, to his own presence, feeling the compression—claustrophobic, almost—and the darkness as a lack of light. 

There was Wing, and there, he knew, he could feel them, like a pack of predators, circling Wing, were all the demons who had whipped him into being who he was, what he was.  There was shame and degradation and anger, and insignificance, there were all the petty incidents of humiliation and pain, swirling like things with sharp fangs and claws, scenting prey. And Gasket’s death. And his fear and flight.  And that tiny, red-hot light of pride, that cast a scarlet glow over the darkness, that his violence, at least, was valued. 

All of these, the entire history, pressed down upon Wing like a maelstrom, reaching as if to punish him for not suffering.  Drift found himself, in this non-body space, flinging himself between his past and Wing, like a thin cloak of shadow. 

And the next he knew, he was panting, spark hammering with half a dozen half remembered panics, arms around the jet, as though sheltering him from a blast.  Wing moved, gently, under him, into the embrace, and Drift had one last fleeting flash of that beautiful spaciousness.  He pulled back, clumsily, hand tethered to Wing’s, struggling to think of what to say.

Wing’s arms moved, tightening around him, one hand on the back of Drift’s neck, pressing him against his shoulder. Drift didn’t fight it, taking comfort in the closeness, the soothing, stable, safe hum of Wing’s systems, in not having to see or be seen.  Feeling was more than enough: feeling Wing against him, feeling his own, unnamable emotions.

“….sorry,” he mumbled, though he didn’t know what he was sorry for. Hurting Wing? Having the history he did? He just knew that it hurt, more than he’d imagined it could, to see Wing under threat of that, as though something white and beautiful was in danger of being overwhelmed with Drift’s history.

“No,” Wing said, soothing a hand down Drift’s back. “Never be sorry for who you are.”

Drift wanted to pull away, but couldn’t bring himself to, drawn by the merest whisper of that gentle pastel glow in the light of Wing’s optics.

“I’ve seen your darkness,” Wing whispered, and Drift felt the connection between them opening up, expanding like a dawn breaking over the horizon of night, the jet's hands stroking over him, accepting, wanting, and pulling Drift all-too-willingly toward that bright, big space that was his being. "Now let me show you my light." 


End file.
